Jeffrey Peterson

Professor, Physics

Education

Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley

Research

Peterson’s group designs and builds novel radio telescopes at some of the world's quietest sites. These are used to study dark energy, which is causing the expansion of the universe to accelerate, to search for mysterious distant Fast Radio Bursts, and to search for the turn-on of the first stars to form after the Big Bang. The telescope designs include cylindrical reflectors, huge arrays of satellite dishes, and ultra-precise multi-octave spectrometers. Telescope sites used by the team include Isla Guadalupe, off Mexico, Marion Island, 2000 Km south of South Africa, the Xin-Jiang region of China, and Klerefonteine, South Africa. Past work by the team includes Cosmic Microwave telescopes at the South Pole, including White Dish, Python, Viper and ACBAR, which were used to determine the total mass of all contents of the Universe, in effect weighing the Universe.